As digital ad fatigue intensifies and customer acquisition costs climb, word-of-mouth remains the most trusted marketing channel. Yet it’s challenging to scale. Swiss startup hypt aims to solve this with its Word-of-Mouth Manager platform, designed to turn personal recommendations into a systematic and measurable growth lever.
The platform enables companies to mobilise satisfied customers through real-time feedback, verified reviews, and targeted referral prompts. hypt has gained early traction across sectors where trust matters most: banking, insurance, and fast-moving consumer goods.
Today, hypt announced it has closed an oversubscribed CHF 1.65 million seed round led by German VC VENPACE, with participation from SixThirty Ventures, COREangels, SICTIC, Gateway Ventures, and NCA. The fresh funding will accelerate product development and fuel expansion beyond Switzerland into the broader DACH region.
Digitising the trust
Founded in Bern in 2022, hypt’s founders, Tobias Wegmüller and Pascal Mathis, bring backgrounds in fintech, enterprise software, and customer experience. Their work with Swiss financial institutions revealed a consistent challenge: authentic word-of-mouth advocacy is difficult to capture and scale.
hypt’s platform addresses this by embedding word-of-mouth directly into sales and marketing workflows. At its core, the Word-of-Mouth Manager combines instant customer feedback with credible review generation and behaviour-triggered referral prompts.
Unlike most referral programs that depend on discounts or manual outreach (ReferralCandy, Yotpo, and Influitive), hypt integrates deeply with enterprise CRM and sales tools, allowing brands to track advocacy impact in real-time and optimise accordingly. Its focus is on genuine customer satisfaction rather than incentivised referrals, a crucial distinction in trust-sensitive industries.
“We see hypt as an exceptional founding team whose solution, in times of AI and digital sensory overload, emphasises the value of authentic, personal recommendations. A highly relevant channel that has primarily relied on the hope of recommendations from individual customers. With hypt, the principle of hope is a thing of the past; companies now have a scalable and traceable path for word-of-mouth marketing, ” said Ingo Küpper, Managing Director of VENPACE.
What’s next?
Since its launch, hypt has secured a roster of major Swiss clients, including UBS, Migros Bank, Raiffeisen, Nestlé, Sanitas, and PostFinance. The 20-person team plans to leverage its new seed funding to accelerate product innovation and expand its presence across the DACH region, with an eye to further growth in broader European markets.
Looking ahead, hypt aims to shift word-of-mouth from an occasional marketing boost into a core pillar of brand growth strategy, transforming trust into a measurable, owned asset in an increasingly noisy digital landscape.
